Mike Rila Cooks With Fire
... on his BattleBot rotisserie
By Virginia B. Wood, Fri., Aug. 6, 2010
My friend Mike Rila loves a project, and he's a self-reliant multitasker. The Saturday I dropped by to interview him for this story, he had pork cooking on the backyard rotisserie, water going in the garden, and he was working underneath a classic black 1962 Plymouth Belvedere up on blocks in the front yard. Mike has been married to my friend Kellye for nearly 20 years, and he's one of those remarkably handy guys who can do pretty much anything he sets his mind to. He makes his living as a plumber, but he and Kellye built both of the houses they own in Wimberley, and they extensively remodeled their current home in South Austin before moving in. Once the house was done, Mike enhanced the backyard with a screened-in porch, built a deck with a fire pit, put in a pond, and installed their raised-bed vegetable garden. He can fix cars and brew beer (and moonshine, as a result of his backwoods Ohio adolescence), and he sees no point in buying something if he can make it himself. "Manual Mike, that's what we call him," Kellye says with pride.
Kellye Rila and I have been cooking (and eating) buddies for more than 10 years, but Mike and I really didn't bond over food until about a year ago. He helped me with the heavy lifting required to get a turkey into and out of the deep fryer last Thanksgiving (see "Food-o-File," Dec. 25, 2009), and we talked about how he had learned to garden and cook watching his mom feed a house full of kids on a Presbyterian minister's small salary. To thank him for the help, I gave him a review copy of British chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's encyclopedic cookbook The River Cottage Meat Book (Ten Speed Press, 544 pp., $40). Mike devoured the book, and our next conversation was all about how it inspired him to prepare a crown roast of pork during the winter holidays. This story evolved from the point where Mike's impressive handiness and his interest in cooking intersect. "Get him to tell you about the BattleBot rotisserie he built," Kellye encouraged one day over brunch at Olivia, and the story took shape from there.
It turns out that all those inviting backyard amenities made the Rila house a natural party destination, and the couple soon found themselves hosting cookouts for their legion of friends. "I'd be sweltering over the grill, and guys would stand there with me for a few minutes drinking a beer, but they'd wander off and I'd end up missing most of the party and smelling like smoke," Mike said ruefully. He realized he needed an apparatus that he could move over the fire pit or the grill that would rotate automatically to ensure even cooking without constant supervision. "How can I do that?" he wondered aloud. "I knew it had to be cantilevered and mobile, so I made a sketch, looked around here for things I could use, and went to Lowe's for the rest. I ordered small telescope motors to turn the meat rods from American Science & Surplus online," he recalls. There is no end to this man's ingenuity.
What Mike came up with does resemble a small version of those motorized machines robot geeks use to fight in televised competition, which is why Kellye christened it the BattleBot rotisserie. The concrete frame sits in a metal form on wheels, making it possible for Mike to roll it up to the grill rather than using a remote control to send it into battle, but somehow that doesn't seem like his style, anyway. The BattleBot didn't see any action last summer, what with the killer heat making backyard entertaining uncomfortable and the severe drought making any fire risky. But Mike's back in business this year. His meat of choice is most often chicken, because "with this style of cooking, you get a good crispy skin."
When I saw Argentine chef Francis Mallmann present a live fire cooking demonstration and dinner class at Central Market in the late spring, I realized Mallmann and my pal Mike were kindred spirits. I gave Mike a copy of Mallmann's award-winning cookbook, Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way (Artisan, 278 pp., $35), for inspiration and told him I wanted to write a story about him and his homemade cooking contraption. Before long, we were talking about what he would cook. The most impressive dish Mallmann presented at the Central Market dinner was whole salmon sides cooked in a salt crust. Mike was intrigued by Mallmann's salt crust cooking method – encasing fish or meat in a damp crust of kosher salt and applying heat from both sides to deliver a moist, flavorful meal. Instead of fish, he chose to go with a 4-pound pork shoulder roast. However, following the author's instructions to wrap the meat in pork skin before applying the salt crust proved to be a challenge in itself.
"I knew I'd seen whole pig heads and skin for chicharrónes at the Mexican market on Stassney, so I figured that would be the best place to look," Mike explains. He got a friend to translate for him at the neighborhood carnicería and came home with enough pork skin to successfully wrap the pork roast. He seasoned the pork shoulder with slivers of sautéed garlic and wrapped it in the skin, carefully tying the package with kitchen twine before sliding it onto the meat rods and packing it in the moist salt crust. While the crust set, Mike got his fire going using his preferred fuel of choice, Cowboy Charcoal Co. hardwood charcoal ($6.97 for 8.8 pounds at Lowe's). "It's made with their hardwood flooring scraps, and it burns clean and hot without any of that chemical smell you can get with those pressed briquettes," he explains.
I wish I could tell you Mike was able to make the salt-crusted pork roast successfully rotate on the BattleBot, but even the wire cage he devised couldn't keep the crust intact. Undaunted, he scraped off the crust and left the wrapped pork slowly turning over the hot coals. He checked it periodically with a meat thermometer and removed it from over the coals when the interior temperature reached 165 degrees Fahrenheit. The outside skin had rendered into a big, salty chicharrón, leaving the pork inside moist and full of flavor. To accompany the meat, Mike made a salsa by blending a can of Muir Glen Organic fire-roasted tomatoes, some sun-dried tomatoes and Boggy Creek Farm smoke-dried tomatoes packed in olive oil, and about six twice-roasted (as in roasted, peeled and seeded, and then returned to the fire for added roasted flavor) poblano peppers. The thick, smoky-sweet salsa was the perfect foil for the mild, juicy meat. What a feast!
While we were eating, Kellye told me that from time to time she's overheard her married friends sitting around the backyard asking their husbands for a screened-in porch, a deck, a fire pit, or maybe some kind of water feature. "So far, none of them has asked for a BattleBot," she laughs. I can tell her why – without Manual Mike, it just wouldn't be the same.
